In recent years, CAD technologies or the like that are design support techniques for making a series of works more efficient and of higher-quality, such as an initial design, a verification, a test, laying, or an operation of a complicated and large-scale network infrastructure (for example, servers and storage groups of an IDC center or the like and a network configuration for connecting them) have been known as disclosed in, for example, Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 09-153011.
A design work of a network infrastructure generally consists of three design processes that are a logical network design for linking apparatuses, a detailed configuration design of an apparatus, and a power supply system design of an apparatus. The design processes and persons in charge of designs are separated for each process and the processes are independently designed.
For this reason, as illustrated in FIG. 18, there is utilized a CAD system that can handle one apparatus by dividing (referred to as portion division) the apparatus into a network, a device configuration, and a power supply. Moreover, as illustrated in FIG. 19, the description of such a CAD system can be divided into a network diagram, a detailed configuration diagram, and a power supply system diagram.
One product consists of a plurality of portions, and each portion has a symbol that expresses a function thereof. An identifier (in the example of FIG. 19, an identifier “A” and an identifier “B”) for uniquely identifying a product is given to the product by arranging the symbol of each product on a drawing. Therefore, even when identical products are arranged, each product can be distinguished.
Three types of design data of an apparatus are design data related to one apparatus physically. The plurality of design data designed from the different aspects are merged. Specifically, the work for manually merging design data is performed in consideration of identifiers and apparatus names applied to the design data conventionally.
The persons in charge of the respective design data are different in the above-described technology for manually merging design data. Because identifiers for apparatuses may be overlapped or the persons in charge of the designs may use different apparatus names in some cases, the merging work is burdensome and the design data for each product is not efficiently managed.